Boston University is another first-time SC11 Student Cluster Challenge competitor. The application submitted by the BU Terriers made me laugh out loud – it was very well written and genuinely funny. This team has personality, and it’ll be great to have them in Seattle.

The Colorado Buffaloes are one of five teams returning to the fifth annual Student Cluster Challenge in Seattle next month during SC11. Like Purdue, Colorado has participated in every challenge but has yet to take home the gold medal. (There aren’t any gold medals awarded. Pity.)

In five years of Student Cluster Challenge (SCC) action at the annual Supercomputing Conference, Purdue has yet to hoist the championship trophy over their collective heads. (There isn’t a championship trophy, but there should be.) They’ve had an impact, winning the Green Award for most flops/watt in 2008 and 2009, but they haven’t taken either the LINPACK or the overall crown. (There should be a crown too.)

This year’s SC11 Student Cluster Challenge will see five returning teams and three teams that are new to the competition (that’s eight total for those keeping track). One of the returning teams is the pride of Russia, the team from Nizhny Novgorod State University (NNSU).

This is the second year the University of Texas Longhorns will compete in the Student Cluster Challenge at the annual Supercomputing Conference. They brought a lot of personality to the competition last year with a “TACC to the Future” theme combining one of their sponsors (University of Texas Advanced Computing Center) with the series of increasingly crappy “Back to the Future” movies.

Sony may be late to the Android tablet party but it has turned up with something rather unusual and hopefully different enough from the iPad to not suffer the attentions of Apple’s hyperactive legal department.

A group of six men who have spent the past 17 months sealed up inside a spaceship simulator near Moscow - in order to investigate the problems which might arise on a mission to Mars - are about to regain their liberty.

Having made its first commercial flight on October 26, with a chartered promotional flight to Hong Kong, the new 787 Dreamliner enters regular airline service today. This is of course a great excuse for us to talk about the competition between the differing technologies and market visions favoured by rival aerospace colossi Airbus and Boeing.

In the absence of anything shiny, the hoi polloi and the media focused on Siri as the The Big Idea at the iPhone 4S launch. Android has supported basic voice commands for ages, but there are now a number of Siri-wannabes in the Market. But are they of any use other than as a bit of mild amusement?

A number of websites were taken offline yesterday, and remained down this morning, after a load of servers run by Gloucester-based hosters Fasthosts fell over. Services on the hosting side are back up now, but the outage provoked angry responses.

A Canadian politician has rather deliciously insisted that vast tracts of his nation were opened by "the relentless pursuit of beaver", an agreeable concept that for some reason conjures an image of Silvio Berlusconi furiously paddling a kayak through white water rapids in pursuit of a fleeing supermodel.

All change on the Barracuda front: despite the disastrous floods in Thailand, Seagate will ship its terabyte-per-platter Barracuda desktop drives this month. At the same time it's phasing out its slower rotating Barracuda Green drives and says it will transition the Barracuda XT to hybrid flash and hard disk technology.

As various bods gather in London for a conference on cyber-security, leading online rights campaigners have penned a letter to Foreign Secretary William Hague urging the government to maintain freedom and privacy while promoting security.

It has been a year since I have talked about securing browsers against privacy invasion. In that time, things have got worse, not better. In addition to the threat of malware and malicious scripts, we have the frightening new evercookie.

Even the staunchest opponent of all things games would have been hard pushed to avoid the determined advertising campaign waged on us by EA of late. TV spots, billboards, websites, magazines, sides of buses, newspapers, even logos on tanks in one recent London stunt, all liberally displaying brand Battlefield.

More data more often than not means more disks. It was ever thus - but in these cash-strapped times, just buying more kit is no longer an option. But is it really that easy to stop the growth/spend cycle and make what you’ve already got work harder? Could you solve everything by throwing a bit of elastic cloud storage into the mix, or does that just move the problem?

It’s the kind of thing that a conference organiser dreams about: a product launch that goes around the world. That’s what last week’s Electric Vehicle Conference in Brisbane got when a local collaboration launched an Australian-built e-sportster.

Netflix and Amazon have extended existing content deals with Walt Disney Company in a clear sign that the meeja world wants online video streaming to become big business Stateside and, presumably, beyond.

If large-scale storage networks were managed in the same way as city road traffic systems the result would be catastrophic, with traffic jams, delayed delivery and lost messages. Network Fabric management, unlike road traffic management systems, has both real-time traffic management and an end-to-end view to find faults fast and fix them.

Battlefield 3 has become the fastest-selling videogame in EA's history, with ten million units leaving the publisher's distribution centres since last week's release. Half of those were picked up by gamers in the space of a few days.

The semiconductor supply chain is bracing for impacts from the flooding in Thailand, but sales were good through the end of September, according to statistics compiled by the Semiconductor Industry Association. Global semiconductor sales hit $25.8bn, up 2.7 per cent sequentially from August. That's the positive spin. The negative spin is that on a year-on-year basis, the SIA reckons that chip sales slipped 1.7 per cent.

UK Prime Minister David Cameron has insisted that government “doesn’t own the internet, run the internet or shape the internet”, despite having said that he was considering shutting down social media during the London riots.

Calxeda, formerly known as Smooth-Stone in reference to the river rock that the mythical David used in his sling to slay Goliath, doesn't think the server racket can wait for the 64-bit ARMv8 architecture (announced late last week) to be designed and tested in the next few years.

Hewlett-Packard might have been wrestling with a lot of issues as CEOs and their strategies come and go, but the company's server gurus know a potentially explosive business opportunity when they see it.

Parliament's Business Select Committee heard some interesting news today, as they mulled the Hargreaves Report’s recommendations. Executive director of the Open Rights Group Jim Killock told MPs that the UK’s copyright laws were deterring investors and new businesses. Alas, he could have picked a better example.

The word on the street is that a Gmail app for iOS is about to hit Apple's App Store. If true, not only would iPhone and iPad Gmailers benefit, but Android device makers would lose one of their advantages over Apple's iDevices.

The Duqu malware used to steal sensitive data from manufacturers of industrial systems exploits at least one previously unknown vulnerability in the kernel of Microsoft Windows, Hungarian researchers said.

A small array of scripts programmed to pass themselves off as real people stole 250 gigabytes worth of personal information from Facebook users in just eight weeks, researchers said in an academic report to be presented next month.